MUSIC

Shomyo of Koya-san & Midori Takada YOU WHO ARE LEAVING TO NIRVANA WRWTFWW Records and MEG Museum (Geneva) are ecstatic to announce a new full length album by celebrated Japanese percussionist Midori Takada (Through The Looking Glass), in collaboration with Buddhist monks belonging to the Samgha group of the Shingon school of Koya-san, led by Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is available on half speed mastered vinyl LP, housed in a 350gsm sleeve, with OBI, and liner notes, as well as on digipack CD. Recorded at The Premises Studio (London) and in Tokyo in 2019,You Who are Leaving to Nirvana is a majestic work combining a suite of six Buddhist liturgical chants and a musical creation by Midori Takada. The Buddhist chants come from three types of repertoires: shomyo ("Teisan", "Unga-Bai", "Sange", "Taiyo"), but also goeika ("Kannon-Daiji") and mantra ("Hannya-Singyo"). After supervising the recording of the Buddhist chants, Midori Takada added her own compositions, with subtle layers of percussion and the melodies of her beloved marimba, giving full life to the sacred texts. Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa explains: "Shomyo is a form of declamation of sacred esoteric texts, inherited over many generations. The power of words goes far beyond their mere pronunciation. I think there is something that words alone cannot really convey. If I recite prayers in a musical way, the feeling transmitted will be even stronger than if I say it normally, in everyday language. I think that the musicality of a work carries a hidden power that cannot be expressed in words alone. The setting of the music has an additional power for you and for those around you who listen to it. The words of a song are not just words set to music. They carry an additional hidden power that cannot be expressed in any other way. Listening to Midori Takada's musical performance, the words truly seem to come alive." Original recordings of the Buddhist chants are held in the International Archives of Folk Music (IAFM) at the MEG Museum in Geneva. The album sleeve features an artwork by famed Japanese sculptor Katsura Funakoshi selected by Midori Takada. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is released in conjunction with Midori Takada's Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter, also available on LP and CD on WRWTFWW Records. Buddhist Chants / Environmental / Ambient / Percussion

Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI's Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Originally released in 1979, Sei Note In Logica (Six Notes In Logic) is Cacciapaglia's second album. While his debut, Sonanze, offers a series of ambient mini-soundtracks, Sei Note presents a singular, sinuous piece. The composition is based on a finite set of musical notes, yet this limitation is the point of departure for a grand tour of possible combinations and enthralling timbres (marimbas, strings, reeds and human voice).

Like Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, the joyous experiment of Sei Note is grounded in constant variation. Often doubled by multiple instruments, non-repeating patterns are exquisitely layered, while electro-acoustic signals transform and further refract through visceral effects. Within this conceptual framework, Cacciapaglia does not so much juxtapose rigid dichotomies – acoustic vs. electronic, melodic vs. dissonant, simple vs. complex – as fuse them into an expansive whole.

What started as an inspired study in Minimalism becomes a bold feat of 20th century music. Sei Note In Logica is deeply sincere and, at the same time, quite playful. With one foot firmly planted in the past and the other steeped in technology, Cacciapaglia's influence can be heard in the work of Jim O'Rourke, Fennesz and Ben Vida.

The 2019 masterpiece by Taipei-based brother duo Mong Tong—who have previously released works on labels such as WV Sorcerer Productions and Guruguru Brain—is now available on cassette! The title “明” (“brightness”) derives from the ideogram combining the sun and the moon, embodying a concept that explores the threshold between light and darkness, everyday life and dreamscapes. Echoes of psychedelic rock, Southeast Asian folk motifs, shimmering synths, and mellow melodies overlap, unfolding within gently hypnotic rhythms that guide the listener into otherworldly landscapes. Transcending psychedelic ornamentation, the album carries a meditative, spacious atmosphere, standing at the crossroads of ambient, drone, and experimental music—a sonic journey that bridges dream and reality.

Two tracks taken from his first and third album released early/mid 90's - both previously never released on vinyl. Space was newly mixed by Ryoji Ikeda for this EP.

Ryoji Ikeda was born in 1966 in Gifu, Japan. He lives and works in Paris, France and Kyoto, Japan. He's one of the most influential minimal electronic musicians and sound artists of our time and also works as a cutting edge visual artist

In 1982, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela used two tambouras to create a document that will go down in history. They are also a strong tribute to their Guru = Pandit Pran Nath. The thick drones of the tambouras create a moiré-like effect, and the meditative state itself is brought out in this highly pure meditative work. There are many sources of minimal and drone music, but I've never heard anything that brings about such a spiritual transformation. It's like something that's been flowing for thousands of years, and it's in a perfect state that can't be cut down or added to. The 44-page booklet is included.

An overwhelming display of spiritual drone minimalism, marking the poised pinnacle of a true master at the forefront of the contemporary scene! Japanese sound artist FUJI|||||||TA—renowned for collaborations with Boredoms and Akio Suzuki—returns with his latest work Live at Epsilon Spires, now issued on vinyl via Feeding Tube. Centered around his self-built pipe organ, the sound unfolds with a purity that transcends mere experimental music, resonating like prayer or the trembling of the atmosphere itself. Within its stillness and resonance lies a profound sense of time and expansive space, carrying a sublimity comparable to historical masterpieces such as Sōmei Satō’s Mandala / Sumeru or Ellen Fullman’s In The Sea. A crystalline current of soundscape, this recording leads the listener to the very roots of sound itself.

In 2017 Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer traveled together to the Åland Islands (an archipelago that is host to around 6,500 islands) in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. They headed to the islands with the intention of helping two friends (mother/daughter duo Jannika/Sage Reed) barn raise a small inn named Hotel Svala in Kumlinge (a municipality consisting of a small group of islands and a population of about 320). The idea was that, once completed, Svala would host artist residencies and workshop programs, creating a direct link between the islands and the USA. The concept of recording music there came about as Honer & Chiu learned more and more about the islands. They were taken by the serene and strange quality of the place. The sun doesn’t set in the summer (and barely rises in the winter). The network of miniature islands is traversed by ferry which, according to Chiu, “casts a surreal horizontal movement through space and time, with islands shifting into and out of periphery, totally still and calm, yet always in motion.” In 2019 they were awarded a grant from the Department of Culture to return and perform a concert at the Kumlinge Kyrka, a 14th century medieval church adorned with incredible frescos. The concert was recorded and became source material – along with improvisations on viola and electronics, pipe organ, pump organ, piano, synthesizers, field recordings and voice memos, all captured across both their trips at various locations on the archipelago – from which they meticulously crafted a post-script in the form of 'Recordings from the Åland Islands'. Easing listeners into the feeling of the place, the album’s opening track “In Åland Air” is a dream-like haze that slows time, invoking the feeling of descending by plane onto the archipelago, a place Chiu recalls as “lush with a gentle, brackish breeze...” On “Snåcko,” a track named for the island next to Kumlinge, the music becomes a transportive portrait, painting in sound “the romantic and gentle atmosphere of the forests in Åland — a place where your eyes slowly adjust to the rainbow-colored moss covering granite boulders. Walking around, you find the forest floor blossoming with blueberries, currants, and flowers...” The longest and darkest movement in the collection, “Archipelago,” encapsulates “the experience of being surrounded in the vast network of islands” with a dense cloud of slowly modulating string layers, improvised by Honer in an empty swimming pool at Svala. “The heaviness of the track,” says Honer, “is a reference to the deep darkness experienced during the Nordic winter days.” But the plaintive atmosphere of that penultimate piece is succeeded with the triumphant final movement of the album, “Under the Midnight Sun,” which bellows forth like a vibrant chorus of melodious sighs, echoing classic sounds from Jon Hassell’s 'Vernal Equinox', or Franco Battiato’s 'Clic', or Brian Eno’s 'Another Green World'. Just as two eyes, two ears, and two halves of a brain work together to create a memory, on their duo debut, Honer and Chiu’s collective pallet produces a vivid three-dimensional hyperreality of painterly tones and textures – bright and kaleidoscopic, but with a deeply warm, earthen resonance. The music evokes a powerful sense of place, transporting and immersing listeners in the other-world of the Åland Islands. And though they achieve this in beautifully natural, organic manner, Chiu & Honer agree this album is quite unlike anything they’ve made before, and likely unlike anything they’ll make in the future. ...about Chiu & Honer... The combination of modular synthesizer and viola is an uncommon one, but Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer manage to create a distinctive dyad that comes together with grace and truth. They’ve accomplished this by bringing much more than their respective axes to the table. Years of collaboration, cohabitation, shared experience, and separate but equally inspired commitments to utilitarian cultural work bind their disparate timbres together into a singular aesthetic reality. The two artists met, appropriately, as members of a large ensemble performing Terry Riley’s “In C,” for an annual concert organized by Bitchin Bajas at Chicago modern music hub Constellation. Honer & Chiu had been living and working in Chicago for a long time, both active members of the notoriously interconnected improvisational and experimental music scenes, but they were somehow previously unintroduced. Chiu’s musical CV to that point included work with bands like Icy Demons and Chandeliers, but he was mostly known for his visual and graphic design work as Some All None. Honer had primarily worked as an instructor in Chicago, as well as a member of the ensemble Quartet Datura. In 2014, a year after their first collaboration, together, they decided to migrate to Los Angeles to continue developing their respective careers and crafts in sunnier climes. Relocation to Los Angeles has proven to be fruitful for both artists. Honer has since become a first-call session player for the likes of Adrian Younge and Beyoncé. She’s also played on recordings by Chloe x Halle, Angel Olsen, Fleet Foxes, and Stanley Clarke, among others, including five recordings with Grammy nominations. Along with her session work, Honer is on the music faculty at California State University. Chiu has expanded his visual work in numerous capacities, in addition to becoming an active intersectional community organizer, and refocusing his musical practice to electronic music composition and sound art. He’s also become an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design; has exhibited/performed at The Getty Center, LACMA, and other distinguished locales; has become a resident programmer for Dublab; and has generated a strong unit of regular musical collaborators that includes Celia Hollander, Booker Stardrum, Ben Babbitt, Dustin Wong, Takako Minekawa, and Sam Prekop. Chiu has also designed album artwork for several International Anthem releases, including Angel Bat Dawid's Transition East, Dos Santos's City of Mirrors, Jeff Parker's Forfolks, and JP's Myspace Beats.

Described as "one of the greatest musical achievements of the 20th century," The Well-Tuned Piano is the most important and revolutionary musical monument of La Monte Young's oeuvre. With the mysteries and traditions of the Orient, natural overtones, a Bösendorfer tuned to pure tuning over several weeks, and the ethereal lighting of Marian Zazeela, this is a unique opportunity to engage in the full scope of historical music that will probably never be performed again. A 52-page booklet is included to help you decipher this work, and although this is a large DVD (over 6 hours), the sound quality is good enough to be played as audio, even for those who have the Gramavision version. The link to the sound source is the Gramavision version.

It was recorded before coming to the United States by Indian classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996) who had a great influence on the art world such as minimal music-Fluxus such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Henry Flynt etc. , 1968 The recording work Ragas Of Morning & Night (released from Gramavision in 1986) in India is finally officially reissued from the label of his direct disciple La Monte Young!

On the A side, the morning Raga Raga Todi, which is full of vitality suitable for awakening, is recorded, and on the B side, the night Raga Raga Darbari, which is swept away by the rhythm of a loose tabla, is recorded. At that time, there is an anecdote that Mr. and Mrs. Lamonte listened to the recording of Pandit Pran Nath around 1968 and fell in love with the voice and passed the seal, but when you see that this sound source was recorded in the same year, it was probably recommended by them in 1986. It was probably released by Gramavision in the year. A masterpiece of pure and crystallized meditative Kirana guarana from Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan (Pandit Pran Nath's master).

“The land of Kanada, Gopal Nayak, the romance of the Mughal courts, Mian Tansen, classicism,
blue notes, imagination, an ancient virtuosic performance tradition handed down for centuries
from guru to disciple, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, lifetimes of devotion – all of these together
and more make up Pandit Pran Nath ’s Darbari, a masterpiece, a gift to our time. ”

–La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela

Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives.

For more than two decades, Okkyung Lee has stood at the forefront of the most radical trajectories of experimental music: a virtuosic cellist and improviser, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth. Particularly noteworthy for her range, dexterity, and adaptability, over the last five years Lee’s output has revealed unexpected shifts and developments that move far afield from the realms of free improvisation for which she is most well know. 2020’s Yeo​-​Neun, a heart-wrenching, ambient chamber work - drawing inspiration from the Korean popular music of her youth - was issued by Shelter Press to great critical response, followed closely by Teum (The Silvery Slit) - one of a series engrossing electroacoustic works created at Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris - on Portraits GRM, and then 나를 (Na-Reul) in 2021, regarded by Lee as a closing statement of more than two decades living in New York, which set the precedent of her allowing her emotions to fully occupy the forefront of the music for the first time. Marking her return to Shelter press, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, encounters Lee upturning the apple cart once again, weaving a profoundly intimate artistic statement on completely unexpected terms.

Like its three aforementioned predecessors, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) belongs to broadening shift in Lee’s approach to composing that roughly aligns with her return to her native South Korea, having lived in the United States since her late teens. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to those critical challenges and questions provoked by significant life change. Worked on in isolation, and continuously returned to, over the course of four years, the album’s nine pieces began with a simple recognition that experimental music is not always what we imagine it to be. It is a practice and a pursuit - a music for which, at its inception, the outcome is unknown - rather than an idiom defined by certain syntaxes, approaches, and qualities of structure and sound. From this departure point, Lee began to inquire after the utility of music itself: what is it for, what does it do, and what place does it (or can it) occupy in our lives?

This solitary and durational journey, each composition gradually moving through different phases and evolutions over years, led Lee toward uncharted ground: a music that is not only playful, introspective, and seductive, but also intended to provoke a relationship to experimental music beyond its normative expectations. Rather active or deep listening, it pursues passive listening. Rather than a grand statement, it is discreet. Rather than virtuosity, it embraces the elegant and direct. Even more strikingly, for the first time, the music of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) encounters Lee leaving the cello entirely behind.

Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) presents a remarkable form of ambient music - organisations of sound that become their own environment, to be occupied - intended, as the album’s subheading infers, as Background Music For Your Mundane Activities. An expansion of the creative pathways opened by the Korean pop imbued compositions of Yeo​-​Neun, aspects of electronic process explored by Teum (The Silvery Slit), and the emotive foregrounding of 나를 (Na-Reul), each of the pieces presented across the two sides of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) implies something far greater than the limits of its own temporarily: a mood, provocations of memory and place, mirrors for the solitude within which it was made, and palpable emotion lingering just out of grasp. For Lee, each of the album’s compositions could be continued or looped for an indeterminate duration: straddling a ground between the minimal and the baroque, enveloping the listener in endless cycles of appreciating, repetitive and rhythmical notes, flirting with the melodic and implying a disembodied imagism that borders on the profound.

Remarkably beautiful and direct, Okkyung Lee’s Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities represents a radical reconfiguration of experiential music, stripped to its bare essence in defiance of the widely presumed aesthetic signifiers. Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, this immersive body of intimate recordings not only reveals new dimensions of Lee’s striking range as an artist, but also of how we might regard and occupy music itself: an ambience to lived and felt like a second skin.

The latest title from Good Morning Tapes, the cult-favorite cassette label known for its extremely unique catalog, is a mixtape by New York-based new age archivist Mark Griffey (aka Ultravillage) that draws from his vast collection of US cassettes from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, presenting obscure ambient, minimal, progressive rock, electronic, and new age music. This mixtape features obscure ambient, minimal, progressive rock, electronic, and new age music from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s on cassette from the United States. A wonderful selection of light rhythmic and melodic charms woven together over the course of an hour.

A stunning new cassette release from Yama Yuki—head of Tokyo-based label 〈ato.archives〉, known for reissuing key works by Masami Tada (East Bionic Symphonia, Marginal Consort) and Masahiro Sugaya—now arriving via the esteemed 〈Kankyo Records〉. Blending a uniquely Japanese sensibility toward nature, local spirituality, and the vacant textures of urban space, this ambient gem weaves a delicate yet intricate soundscape. Rooted in the lineage of environmental music, minimalism, and post-New Age ambient, it offers a quiet prayer in sound—an auditory landscape you can almost touch.

Northern Irish musician and producer David Cunningham, known for releasing two electro-punk albums on Virgin in the New Wave era and having a worldwide hit single "Money" as The Flying Lizards. The first solo album "Grey Scale" released in 1976 is the first analog reissue from the prestigious . This work was sent out as the first release from his own label , which sent out This Heat and General Strike. From avant-garde musicians such as Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman with whom he has performed live, to improvisers such as Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and David Toop, Cunningham draws influences from a wide variety of fields. At the time, he was a student at the Kent Institute of Art & Design in Kent. , a work that created an infinitely changing palette of sounds. A suite of minimal etudes that does not belong to any genre, with an attractive sound collage and free tones.

Interior” was formed by Daisuke Hinata and Hideki Nonaka, who were alumni of the Berkeley College of Music. Their first album “Interior” was released in 1982 on Haruomi Hosono's label, Yen Records. Their musical style of instrumental synth-pop with an emotional flavor based on “ambient music” and “environmental music” style is one of the most popular styles in the new age music scene in the U.S. Windham Hill Records, one of the leading new age music labels in the U.S., has also taken notice.

Jameszoo (Mitchel van Dinther) returns to Brainfeeder with a wonderfully cinematic album embarking on adventures on the fringes of jazz and contemporary classical. Imbued with the same spirit of adventure and experimental outlook as his previous work on the label, ‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is a new work written for and performed by the renowned Dutch ensemble Asko|Schönberg, percussion group HIIIT and Jameszoo’s own “blind” group: Niels Broos (organ), Petter Eldh (electric bass) and Richard Spaven (drums). Much like in 2019 when he worked with the Grammy-winning Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley to adapt his album ‘Fool’, ‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is a largely acoustic piece diving deeper into and reflecting on the ideas behind his 2022 album ‘Blind’. With 16 musicians and a self-governing disklavier taking center stage this album documents the Dutchman’s foray into contemporary classical music. The title is a nod to Steve Reich’s masterful 1978 album on ECM ‘Music for 18 Musicians’.

“Late in 2022 I was approached by Dutch contemporary music ensemble Asko|Schönberg to ask if I would be interested in writing a new piece for them,” explains Mitchel. “Apart from the fact that I thought this group of fantastic musicians would be a lovely fit for music in the spirit of ‘Blind’, I also always loved the idea of expanding on and continuing a process… being able to show more than one side to a work.”

One of the principal ideas underpinning ‘Blind’ was the notion of active objective listening. “In music and other arts there is a heavy emphasis on the artist,” says Mitchel. “Which composer, which soloist, which performer… and the shifting emphasis between them all colours what we hear. Is it possible to create something that bypasses this?” In reality his explorations only threw up more questions, but this only fuelled van Dinther’s desire to explore further. How is the listener’s perception affected when you try to detach the composer/musician/artist from a work?

Van Dinther started out by working with self-playing robotic instruments to embody the music without the use of human hands. “This created something visually special but was ultimately just a magic trick to fool myself as all these instruments were merely citing what I was giving them as input. There were no autonomous choices being made by these instruments whatsoever, which made me wonder, would it be possible for an instrument to experience some sort of freedom within the context of my music?”

Deciding to focus on a single instrument, van Dinther gave a player piano a pivotal role in his compositions. However, for this concept to work this player piano would need the capacity to make autonomous musical decisions whilst performing (in the way a human improviser or a soloist would do). The player piano is an instrument invented in the late 1800s mainly used for reproducing piano music at home, but there is also a strong tradition in contemporary ensemble

music written for these machines. You can communicate with a modern player piano instructing it what notes to play and when to play them by sending it MIDI information. MIDI is a digital language used for these kinds of musical instructions.

Excited by the possibilities herein, van Dinther contacted a couple of expert friends Hendrik Vincent Koops and Jan van Balen and asked if they wanted to help create this. They opted for making a set of algorithms that could communicate and instruct the player piano through generating custom MIDI. “We created a chain of musical rules per song… rules we thought would be interesting within this context,” explains Mitchel. “We created custom datasets for all of this with the help of fantastic musicians like Kit Downes, Matthew Bourne and Niels Broos. Vincent and Jan decided they wanted to write and script these algorithms mostly by using Markov models and LSTMs. (Markov models and LSTMs are models used in statistical and self learning systems to analyse and generate data). Vincent and Jan ultimately made this dream into a reality!”

When it came to the music written for the rest of the ensemble Mitchel wanted to create something that would showcase some of the specific capabilities of the fantastic musicians. Pieces that would build on the foundation of ‘Blind’ but quoting it freely more so than directly citing it. “I knew I wanted to invite musicians from my own group (Richard

Spaven, Petter Eldh and Niels Broos) and I wanted to extend the percussion section by inviting my friend Frank Wienk from percussion group HIIIT. I sat down with the music and started working on all different parts occasionally helped by my friends and longtime collaborators Niels Broos and Petter Eldh. To help me with the final arrangements I asked Stefan Behrisch with whom I worked on the music that became the 2019 album ‘Melkweg’ with Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley.”

‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is released on Friday 30th May on vinyl/digital formats via Brainfeeder Records. A strictly limited hand-painted and numbered LP edition (of 200) by Mitchel’s longtime friend Philip Akkerman is available exclusively via Bandcamp/Brainfeeder Store.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (Black Truffle, 2022). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie’s long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell.The two short pieces that open the record could almost be the two sides of a wild 7” selected to show off what the Ensemble can do. On opener ‘Gerak Maju’, intricately skittering open-snare patterns bounce over clanging metal, chiming bell-like tones and deep gong hits, adapting the rhythm-register connections heard in traditional Gamelan musics—where the lowest pitched sounds are heard least frequently—to a cut-up breakbeat straight off Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Strollabout’ then moves into an entirely different realm of meditative repeating patterns, performed entirely on Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese gongs. The remaining seven pieces, ranging from three to twelve minutes, offer up a wealth of different percussive, compositional and arrangement possibilities. On ‘Ghostly Klang’, two drumkits mirror each other’s moves, bouncing hats and snares across the stereo field in a way that recalls On the Corner and the jittering hi hat patterns of trap, while slow moving melodies on the tuned instruments add a sense of majesty contrasted by scurrying details in resonant wood. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Uncle’, performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell’s dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal.Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois’ drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.

Black Truffle is thrilled to begin 2025 with a rare solo release from Konrad Sprenger, alias of elusive Berlin composer-producer-instrument builder Jörg Hiller. A prolific collaborator, Sprenger has worked extensively with icons of American minimalism such as Ellen Fullman (with whom her recorded the gloriously eccentric song album Ort) and Arnold Dreyblatt (as a core member of the Orchestra of Excited Strings since 2009), as well as releasing their music on his impeccably curated label, Choose. As an instrument builder and installation artist, he has overseen the creation of a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar and, with Phillip Sollmann, a modular pipe organ system designed to be reconfigured from space to space. In much of Hiller’s work, a scientific approach to acoustic phenomena co-exists with a pop sensibility and a sly sense of humour. Nowhere is this unique combination more in evidence than in his slim body of solo work, beginning with the startling diversity of instrumentation and compositional approaches heard on the short pieces of Miniaturen (2006) and Versprochen (2009), followed by the more single-minded exploration of the computer-controlled electric guitar on Stack Music (2017). Set brings together these various strands of Sprenger’s work into a wildly infectious, playful epic, performed by the composer and the mysterious Ensemble Risonanze Moderne. On the LP’s second side, we are also treated to a guest appearance from longtime collaborator Oren Ambarchi, on whose recent solo releases Simian Angel and Shebang Sprenger has made key production contributions. Ambarchi’s signature stuttering, swirling harmonics weave through a sparkling assemblage of electric guitars, acoustic instruments, percussion and electronics—though, given the deft use that much of Sprenger’s recent production work makes of midi-controlled sampled instrumentation, it’s anyone’s guess where the acoustic ends and the digital begins here. As soon as the needle drops on the first side, we are inside a musical world that Set will inhabit for its 33 minutes: sparkling guitar harmonics and palm-muted notes, tuned percussion, crisp electronic drum hits, flashes of horns, and untraceable bursts of synthetic sound are arranged into a skittering polyrhythmic framework calling up the detail-rich percussive constructions of contemporary techno filtered through the pointillism of the post-serialist European avant-garde. Behind this shifting mist of particulate sound, winds and strings sound out held chords, reminiscent of Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning in their epic yet seemingly aimless drift. The relationship between elements is mysterious, appearing both carefully considered and almost random. Though never straying too far from where it begins, as the piece moves along, it spotlights increasingly bizarre instrument choices (shakuhachi and steel drums, anyone?) as well as momentary liftoffs into motorik propulsion. Set is a fascinating, mercurial thing: at once propulsive and fragmented, essentially static in form yet ever-changing in detail, unabashedly egghead in its construction yet sure to get the feet tapping.

和製コズミック・サイケ／アンビエントの秘宝。今年2月7日に逝去した日本の音楽シーンにおける最大のレジェンドのひとり、Magical Power Makoが、1993年に自主制作で発表した知られざる音宇宙『Next Millennium Vibrations』が、アートワークを新装し、リマスタリング仕様でCD再発！祈りのようなシンセサイザーの波動、メディテイティヴな旋律、そして内面宇宙を旅するようなスピリチュアルな浮遊感。クラウトロック〜ニューエイジ〜環太平洋の民族音楽までを呑み込みながら、誰にも似ていない独自のサイケデリックなサウンドスケープを形成。極私的な録音の中に潜む、未だ聴かれぬ「次の千年」の響き。まさに未来への密やかな手紙です。

London-based percussionist and composer Valentina Magaletti teams up with Japanese experimental electronic artist YPY for Kansai Bruises, an evocative exploration of cross-cultural sonic territories that bridges European avant-garde percussion with Japanese electronic minimalism. The album unfolds across eight carefully crafted tracks that document a metaphysical journey through Japan's Kansai region, where ancient traditions collide with hypermodern urban realities. Opening with One Hour Visa, the record immediately establishes its liminal character—caught between arrival and departure, belonging and displacement.

Magaletti, whose collaborations span from Nidia to Jandek, brings her signature approach of "strategically enriching a folkloristic and eclectic palette through endless listening and experimentation." Her percussion work here is both architectural and atmospheric, creating rhythmic foundations that breathe with organic unpredictability while maintaining an underlying structural tension. YPY's electronic contributions provide the perfect counterpoint—minimal yet emotionally charged, digital yet deeply human. Together, they create soundscapes that feel simultaneously intimate and vast, personal and universal. Standout tracks include the title piece Kansai Bruises, where field recordings merge with processed percussion to create an almost cinematic sense of urban wandering, and Float, which achieves a remarkable state of weightlessness through its interplay of subtle electronics and polyrhythmic percussion. The album's sequencing tells a complete story: from the initial disorientation of One Hour Visa through the nocturnal drift of Lantern Lit Run, the contemplative pause of Interlude for Fog Days, and the surprising warmth of closing track Pesto—a title that hints at the unexpected cultural fusion that defines this remarkable collaboration.

Kansai Bruises represents a significant evolution in transcultural electronic music, proving that the most interesting artistic encounters happen not in the comfort of familiar territory, but in the bruising, beautiful space between worlds.

Official remastered edition of COIL's 1998 drone/ambient masterpiece. “4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of COIL history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve time". Inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and other religions, where the intent is to lose oneself in the music – to meditate or achieve a trance state – Time Machines became Drew McDowall, John Balance, and Peter Christopherson’s “electronic punk-primitive” answer to this tribal concept. Starting as a rough demo tape recorded solely by Coil member Drew McDowall, Time Machines started to take full form when McDowall enthusiastically delivered these demo recordings to Balance and Christopherson as sketches for a new Coil project with the primary goal of shifting Coil’s sound further into a more conceptually abstract direction. Largely recorded in 1997 using single takes with minimal post production, these four drones contain every intended fluctuation and tone, along with every glitch of the original – “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience.”

If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music, and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated. — Hiroshi Yoshimura Originally released as an album in January 1986, Surround was recorded by Yoshimura as a commission from home builder Misawa Homes, intended to function as an “amenity” designed to enhance the company’s newly built living spaces. In his original notes for the album, Yoshimura recommends that Surround be placed in the same family of sounds “as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” And, as he suggests, “with the addition of city noise from outside the window,” you may hear Surround in a completely new way. A pioneer in the field of environmental music, Yoshimura’s previous works included Music For Nine Post Cards (1982), originally produced to be played back inside a museum space, and designing sound environments for public spaces and subway systems. Surround was recorded almost concurrently with the acclaimed and popular GREEN (1986); the two albums are described by Hiroyoshi Shiokawa in his liner notes as being Yoshimura’s yin and yang. 12月上旬入荷。遂に満を持して登場。あの『Green』を凌ぐ人気を誇る、長年失われていた吉村弘最高峰のアンビエント・クラシックこと1986年作品『Surround』が〈Light in the Attic〉配給の〈Temporal Drift〉レーベルより待望の公式アナログ再発！日本の環境音楽のパイオニアであり、都市/公共空間のサウンドデザインからサウンドアート、パフォーマンスに至るまで、傑出した仕事を世に残した偉才、吉村弘。その最難関の音盤として君臨してきた幻の一枚が、今回史上初の公式アナログ・リイシュー。ミサワホームから依頼されて録音された作品で、これらは同社の新築居住空間をより充実させるために設計された「アメニティ」として機能することを目的としていた環境音楽作品。吉村自身による当時のライナーノーツに加え、オリジナル・プロデューサーであった塩川博義氏による新規ライナーノーツも同封（日／英）。 MASTERPIECE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From Recital:

"Recital is joyed to publish the newest record by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Currently working on her PhD in Musicology at UCLA, her trajectory has been unorthodox. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, which, if you've never been there, doesn't really scream "Avant-Garde" (Calgary is the rodeo capital of the world). From a young age, Sarah was a driven pianist (and figure-skater, although that's a story for a different time). It is important and interesting that she chose to study esoteric music; as Sarah could have easily been a cowgirl or a concert pianist had her ingrained love of synthesis and sonic phenomenology not taken the wheel.

Sarah is a considered person. I find few people that have the diligence and resolve to take their time with music... especially in a live context. I respect that about her. The first time I saw Sarah perform, I presumptuously told her that her music reminded me of my favorite Mirror albums (the exceptional project of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann). Sarah was not familiar with Mirror, so the compliment was initially lost on her. Years back I was in the same situation when a review compared my music to Andrew Chalk, who was unknown to me at the time. So I felt a kinship in our magnetic drift towards unspoken and clustered beauty.

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day follows the release of her "sound-wheel" LP All My Circles Run, which examines the isolation of different instruments. Let Night Come On..., recorded mainly with a Mellotron and electronic organ, feels like a return to the nest. Burrowed in the studio, Davachi was the only performer on this album. She both splays her compositional architecture and re-contextualizes the essence of her early output. She chiseled careful and shadowed hymns; anchors of emotion.

Two pillars of this album are "Mordents", which to my ears drops hints of her love for Progressive rock music - and "Buhrstone," comparable to a sombre funeral march of piano and flutes. These two examine punctuations of early music, gently plucking melodies and movements. The three other compositions are tonal works, blowing slow jets of lapping harmonics.

Writing this description now, I find it hard to separate "At Hand" from filmmaker Paul Clipson, who made a melancholic film for this piece of Sarah's. A fitting title for Sarah and Paul's relationship - frequently working in orbit of each other, meticulous and tactile. I cherish this track as a memory of Paul.

This is a lovely album to fill an evening living room with. A blanket, a cup of wine, a dim bulb, a wide window."

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners, the keepers of secrets, the path-finders. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partch are from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe. New on Strut, the first ever reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original albums from 1982, Drumland Dreamland and Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Lori Vambe is a unique figure in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension. Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (Vambe, the sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord; the instrument would manifest itself as the drumgita. In 1982, he privately produced a pair of home recordings, the diptych set Drumgita Solo and Drumland Dreamland, releasing them on his own label Drumony. On these records, he rejected any commercial aesthetic and employed tape effects, temporal shifts, reversed sound and overdubbing to investigate space-time and access the fourth dimension. Combining layered drums with the rhythmic throb of the drumgita and, on Drumland Dreamland, an improvised piano performance by Brazilian concert pianist Rafael Dos Santos, the albums are both hypnotic and perturbing. Both albums were cut at Portland Studios by Chas Chandler and stand as a concealed monument of Black British experimental music. 500 copies of each record were originally pressed, and both were released together. The albums were never performed live. For this first ever reissue of Drumland Drumland and Drumgita Solo, Strut presents the two albums in their original artwork, housed in a deluxe slipcase including an additional 8-page 12”-sized booklet featuring unseen photos, liner notes and an interview with Lori Vambe by The Wire magazine writer Francis Gooding. Both albums are fully remastered by The Carvery.

Marionette is pleased to present dessus oben alto up, the first collaborative recording by Andrea Belfi and Jules Reidy. Hailing from different ends of the globe (Australia and Italy) but both longtime residents of Berlin, Reidy and Belfi’s approaches have much in common, bringing together compositional precision and electroacoustic rigour with improvisation freedom, the immediate gratifications of rhythmic pulse, and an overtly lyrical sensibility. Working together during a residency at the sound studio of Berlin’s Callie’s, an arts institution housed in a 19th century machine factory, the pair (with Marco Anulli manning the desk) have conjured up four expansive pieces where the beautifully recorded percussive clarity of Belfi’s drums threads through a sparkling haze of guitars and electronics.

Opener ‘dessus’ begins with Reidy’s distinctive just-intoned guitar figures, shimmering over a delicate substratum of Befli’s brushwork and bass drum accents. As in all of Reidy’s recent work, the guitar is twisted out of cliché by the unfamiliar tuning and electronic processing. Hanging almost inaudibly in the background for much of the piece, a rush of synthetic tones surges into the foreground to end it. ‘oben’ is built from kinetic patterns of picked guitar arpeggios, locking into irregular grooves with Belfi’s drums, which move from elegant rolls and cymbal patter to driving closed hi-hats and explosive rock interjections. Around the traditional instruments and across the stereo field, electronic sounds swarm and swirl, fizzing and popping in a sun-drenched soundscape that at points suggests both vintage analogue synth destruction and glitching harmonies. ‘alto’ begins in similar territory but turned up a notch, eventually settling into a propulsive 6/8 groove of shifting drum accents, manically strummed 12 string acoustic, and burbling synth chords.

The B side is dedicated to the fifteen-minute ‘up’, where the strategies adopted on the other pieces are put in the service of a more relaxed, slowly unfolding epic. Anchored by a steady pulse throughout, the piece combines chiming guitars, dubbed-out bass lines and constantly adjusted percussive details into a complex flux of sound. Change is at once so subtle and so ever-present that, at any given moment, the listener can never be entirely sure quite how they got there.
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